Mike Glover's Media Blog

Tuesday, 11 November 2014

Are you stuck in a rut? Are you struggling to find a way forward? Are you continually coming up against the same problems? Then the answers may be provided by consulting an artist.
That was what I was promised when agreeing to see one of the country’s up-and-coming artists and would-be shaman Marcus Coates. He put his theories to the test by providing his “Unblocking Service” to invited guests in Kendal, Cumbria.
He outlined to me why he believes skills learned by artists can be used by the rest of the population.
“Art is a solo activity, necessarily self-indulgent, but the skills we use can be very helpful for other people.
“The trick is to find a way to communicate those skills in a functional way, teaching people to use their imagination to explore a different way of looking at rationality.”
Coates has outlined his theories in a book Practical Guide to Unconscious Reasoning, about how to use the imagination for practical purposes.
He holds workshops for people “encouraging them to go into their unconscious world, and allowing solutions to appear in front of them.”
He believes that indigenous peoples naturally use this method of thinking, and it is a skill that the Western world has lost.
“Only 2% of decision-making is conscious, meaning 98% of the unconscious does the work. It is a matter of tuning into that.”
During his sessions at Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Coates had one-to-one sessions with people helping them resolve issues. I was his first victim.
As a journalist based in the Lake District, I was interested in how to overcome the London-centric view of most of the national media. He related to that as an artist.
“The Art World has a set of set ideas about what is valuable. That comes from a cultural elite propagated in London.
“The answer is to forge something new outside of London, which is now happening all the time, but may not be recognised.
“More and more artists are no longer looking to London to valuate what works. We should all bypass London, especially in these days of the Internet, to Europe and the Rest of the World.”
He also predicts that artists will have to leave London as they will not be able to afford to live there.
“They will be a cultural backlash where the producers will no longer live in London and form their own groups and networks elsewhere.”
Coates works with video, photography, sculpture and performance.
His extensive knowledge and understanding of wildlife has led him to create unique interpretations of the natural world and its evolving relationship with society.
At one point in our session, we both yielded to our imagination. True to type he conjured up wild animals behaving strangely. This represented a lack of understanding, a sort of chaos, he explained.
He then drifted into a dark, sub-marine environment that culminated in him taking on the form of a sea-otter anchored to a strand of kelp. He said this made him feel relaxed and it brought him relief to be at the mercy of the current.
Coates was born in 1968 in London and graduated from the Kent Institute of Art and Design in 1990. He completed his MA at the Royal Academy in 1993. He is recognised for his performances and installations that employ shamanistic rituals and contrast natural and manmade processes.
A key element to these explorations is his use of shamanism and rituals to help resolve social issues, such as Journey to the Lower World (2004) in which Coates sought guidance from animal spirits for tenants in a condemned Liverpool tower block,
At the Baltic in 2007 he showed Dawn Chorus, in which the human voice accurately mimicked birdsong. In this multi-screen video installation 19 singers reproduced a recording of a group of wild British birds singing at dawn.
In The Plover’s Wing (2009) Coates performed a shamanic ritual to help answer questions put to him by the Mayor of Solon concerning the Israel/Palestine crisis.
Underpinning all his work is an absurdist streak and deadpan humour that allows him to communicate complex and difficult questions to a wide audience.
Marcus Coates has exhibited internationally and was awarded with the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists in 2008 and the Daiwa Foundation Art Prize in 2009. In 2013, he was shortlisted for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.
He needed all his ingenuity at Abbot Hall. His sessions were due to be held in a wooden structure, a bit like a space-pod on stilts, designed by the architectural practice Sutherland Hussey.
Called Anchorhold, it was built from 25 sheets of ply, precisely machine-cut in such a way so that all pieces interlock with minimal wastage.
Unfortunately it wasn’t up to the Cumbrian weather and let the rain in. So Coates had to carry out his sessions in a small room in the gallery.

Saturday, 26 April 2014

Read, if you so please, this press release from Wasdale Mountain Rescue Team and then I will try to explain how Human Rights/Data Protection legislation makes this sort of nonsense ever more common:
“At around 8.30 p.m. on Saturday night, a late evening but with many groups still out on the mountain, a ‘999’ call was received by Cumbria Police from a pair of walkers in their 20s who reported themselves as lost and stuck on large rocks somewhere on the summit of Scafell Pike. Their location was digitally established by the team leader using the SARLOC system as being on a rocky path within 100m of the summit. They were very lightly equipped, no spare clothing, no map or compass but did have torches. They had ‘gone on ahead’ of the father and friend on the way to the top and became lost. The father had the only map and compass in the group. If the couple had a map they would not have known how to use it. As they were so close to a busy summit, the team leader worked hard to encourage them to make their way to the top and find some helpful walkers. They were unwilling to move as ‘legs were seized up’ even though they knew the team would take a further two hours to get to them.
A limited callout followed, with four team members setting off plus one team member already on the mountain working with a group and a further team member from Penrith MRT already on the mountain. The father and friend, who had presumably given up, were descending via Lingmel Col. They were quickly located by the team member on the fell but the father was not willing to re-ascend to assist in locating his daughter and friend even though their location was now accurately known by the team leader and they were safe on a path although cold and wet.
The team eventually brought the pair back down to the valley bottom, after a very frustrating night for the team leader, and reunited the pair with the father who was asleep in his car at the bottom. The incident was closed at 2.30 a.m.
Inexperience, lack of equipment, insufficient preparation, inability to get themselves out of trouble, not staying together as a group and a less than helpful group leader (the father) – another avoidable rescue to add to the many the volunteer teams are having to deal with.”
So what has this got to do with Human Rights/Data Protection?
Well before these twin curses came to dominate British legislation, the MRT would have been more than likely to name the parties involved in their press release.
The family concerned would have been humiliated and ridiculed by their peers. Anyone tempted to repeat their follies would have thought more than twice and probably decided to act more responsibly.
In fact when the Government first brought in data protection, to safeguard us all from bankers and other pushy institutions selling on our personal details, the Commissioner appointed to police the Act took it upon herself to use the law instead to attack the media.
Her name was Elizabeth France and her first case actually involved a newspaper publishing details of a teacher who took a school party to the top of a mountain in bad weather and inappropriately dressed. When the MRT told the Press the name of the teacher and the school, he appealed to the Commissioner under data protection legislation.
The result was the start of a remarkable clamp down on details given to the media about all sorts of information which ought to be in the public domain.
Never mind that crime victims might want to talk about their experiences to elicit help for the police in catching the culprits; Never mind that traffic accident victims use up public monies for ambulances, hospitals and police; never mind that fire victims are already known to everyone in the neighbourhood and may want to talk about these very public events; none of them any longer have their names released by the police to the media.
Of course the media have other sources and you will notice the commonly used “named by local sources.”
But police are now so fearful of upsetting “human rights” they won’t even confirm names obtained from other sources.
That is why they will never get to hear about any useful information the community might have about these “victims” and which may be pertinent to the police inquiries.
And that is why people will continue to act irresponsibly, and make demands on our emergency services with impunity.
They know that their actions will never face the scrutiny of their peers.
Human rights now trump the right on the wider public to know, at least in the eyes of our misguided legislators and law enforcement agencies.

THE message is loud and clear. The future prosperity of the nation and viability of our businesses are inexorably linked to the world-wide web. This is especially true of rural economies.
The Internet is crucial to sales and profits in a global market. TV Troubleshooter Lord Digby Jones reinforced the point when he dropped in to Ambleside to launch Cumbria University’s business hub.
He urged the county’s companies to tap into the rising Chinese middle-class market, which cannot get enough luxury goods from us Brits, apparently.
Well, I am sorry to be a prophet of doom. But if we rely on British Telecom, the monopolistic IT provider, our efforts are doomed to failure.
The company has become so big and global economy focused that it has lost touch with its customers.
I didn’t want to bother Lord Digby with our little local difficulties, but at the very moment he spoke to the cheering audience in Ambleside, the village where I live was without the Internet. The householders didn’t even have landline telephones.
This was three full days after a cable collapsed and lay between the grazing sheep in a field. It took another three days for BT to get their act together and fix the fault.
That meant that for six days this journalist could do no research, or access e-mails or communicate with his potential markets.
Next door a doctor could not research her ground-breaking thesis, or offer her services as a locum. The other side a bed and breakfast business couldn’t book in any guests, even though one provisional booking was for workers from Open Reach, BT’s arms length repair service. Oh irony of ironies.
The mail order business over the way could not sell or dispatch anything; the caravan site owners up the road couldn’t take bookings or even pay its staff through the electronic system it uses.
A week is 2 per cent of a year. 2 per cent can make the difference between profit or loss, viability or administration.
Yet despite the crucial nature of this very obvious fault, could we get BT to respond? Not quickly enough.
Like most of the villagers, although not all, I have a mobile phone, so as soon as I became aware of the lack of Internet and landline phone on Easter Sunday I contacted BT, or their agents, in Asia. They told me that as it was Easter, they had no engineers and the clock wouldn’t start ticking until Tuesday. They then had four days to fix the fault.
I said that wasn’t good enough and asked to register a complaint, which is what I was told would happen. The next day, Easter Monday I found the fault, the cable lying in a field.
My neighbor tells me he has been telling BT for years that their cables are slung too low across the fields and are bound to get snagged in farm machinery. Some of the telephone poles are rotten. One even has a woodpecker nest in it.
BT ignores these little local problems until there is an emergency. Then they take four days plus Bank Holidays to respond.
I rang my friend in Bangalore or wherever to tell them my exciting news. I don’t think it was even the same city I was talking to, and they confirmed it would be the following Thursday before they got started. When I squealed they said I was the only complainant and it was being handled as a single customer problem.
I then toured the village to find that every other resident (nine households) had complained their businesses were completely blocked by the fault.
I also found out that the caravan site owner was actually a BT business customer and was thinking of quitting as his upload speed was one third of one Mega-Byte. I confirmed mine was less than 1MB.
Stress levels were rising and the only conversation when we met in the lanes was how BT was ruining lives and businesses.
Then joy, on Tuesday an Open Reach engineer turned up, climbed one of the offending poles and with his little hand-held computer tried to fix each connection in the junction box.
After telling him how pleased we were to get some action, I said that although I am no expert I thought he was wasting his time and pointed out the offending cable in the grass. He looked shocked, even though I had told BT the problem two days previously.
He descended and was joined later in the day by a van load of clip-board holders, who took notes, shook their heads and disappeared again.
On Wednesday an Open Reach van appeared and said that new cables, poles and junction boxes would have to be ordered and it would probably be the week after that before work started.
Another neighbor went to the nearest Open Reach depot, in Kendal, to make his views known. On Thursday a van and a cherry-picker turned up and the cable restored. Within minutes Internet and land-lines were working again.
The poles are the same rotten ones. The cable still hangs low over the fields.
If rural areas are really to be given a level-playing field in the global economy, then the infra-structure needs to be in place to support them.
Cables slung over fields are susceptible to wind, ice and tractors. High speed broad-band is not even an option on such copper wires on Victorian technology.
It doesn’t matter which Internet provider you use, unless it is satellite, the Internet comes down wires maintained, or not, by BT.
In the long term, fibre-optic cables, laid underground are the only answer, unless you are lucky enough to live near a business hub.
In the short to mid-term, BT needs to drastically improve its customer service.
Until that happens rural economies are destined to lose out in the global market.

Thursday, 28 March 2013

IT has become fashionable among journalists to recount their encounters with Jimmy Savile, the former DJ whose alleged sexual misbehaviour has dominated the media over recent months. I am not sure whether this represents some public display of guilt that he was allowed to get away with it with apparent impunity for so long. But whatever the motives here are my two pennyworth.
It was after all my dad who put Jimmy Savile on the road to stardom. For many years this would be said with a degree of moderate pride. Not unreserved pride, as Savile was always seen as a bit of a creepy character.
Over the decades there were those who thought his demeanour was obnoxious. For some, but not all, this odiousness was trumped by the herculean feats he performed for charity.
Surely no-one who was evil would give so much time to supporting paraplegics in Stoke Mandeville or giving up free time to be a porter at Leeds hospitals? Now there is an explanation for his deeds that transcends creepy. But no one I ever met suspected that his motive may have been sexual predation.
Certainly when my father was deputy programme controller of the infant TV station Tyne Tees Television at the very start of the 1960s, he could not have suspected.
Peter Glover saw it as part of his mission to bring on other young directors. One was Malcolm Morris, who he put in charge of the project called Young at Heart aimed at the teenage market. He went on to direct the iconic This is Your Life for many years. His own autobiography This Was My Life recalls how my dad discovered Jimmy Savile.
Yorkshireman, Savile was then plying his trade in the large dance halls of Glasgow. My dad brought him to Newcastle to launch his TV career. I met him at the studio and he had dyed his hair tartan and developed the outrageous cigar-smoking persona which came to dominate the English pop scene in its halcyon days. We were not left alone so I was under no threat, even though he demonstrated his larger than life character. I was, however, abused by Savile 20 years later.
During my first freelance journalism career in the early 1980s I was getting plenty of shift-work on the Nationals, with the Daily Star giving me at least two evenings a week. It was a strange set up with the head office in those days in Manchester. The London office was in the back of a corridor in the Daily Express offices in Fleet Street. There was a four-man news desk who not only decided the agenda, they also told reporters exactly what they wanted out of a story, even before the facts were gathered. The introduction was provided in advance of the stories being researched. It was the reporter’s job to make the facts fit the imagined headline.
It was coming up to Christmas 1983 when the assistant News Editor, Ken Bennett, had one of those ideas the popular nationals love. There was a severely disabled girl from the Home Counties who was housebound and a freelance had filed a story saying she had never had a Christmas card from outside the family, sad enough you might think. But Ken had spotted a another story claiming that Savile, by then one of the top Disc Jockeys and TV presenters in Britain, had never sent a Christmas Card.
So one awful snowy night I was dispatched to a shop to buy a card and catch a bus to Shepherd’s Bush where the BBC was recording Jim’ll Fix It, a programme where Jimmy Savile made wishes come true for children. That seems an awful thought now. My task was to get him to sign the card and the Daily Star would send it to the poor girl in Surrey. Well easier said than done. I had to blag my way into the BBC and then wait for a break in recording, so I could button-hole Mr Savile. He kept me waiting in the corridor for about an hour and then, having finally let me in to his private dressing room, took the Mickey mercilessly at my choice of card. I thought he was going to refuse to sign it. I was tempted to remind him that it was my father that put him on the road to stardom, but in the end I decided that was unprofessional and persuaded him to sign the thing anyway, mainly by refusing to leave until he had. Then it was back to the Daily Star to report my triumph and file the story in time for deadline.
Of course this whole episode took on a new perspective when Savile’s alleged predatory paedophilia was highlighted thirty years later. What had he been doing for the hour he kept me waiting outside his dressing room? Certainly it seems his aggressive mocking of me was typically symptomatic of his general bullying of journalists. Even worse, had I tempted him to get in touch with another poor potential victim by sending the Christmas card? I will never know the answers. Until the scandal which rocked the BBC in 2012, my experience of being abused by Savile was just a light-hearted human interest story. But it did give an interesting insight into the mind games he is said by many to play with journalists, police officers and others.
These two episodes are selected extracts from my nearly-completed autobiography “Flirting with Fame”, as yet not available from any bookshops anywhere at all.

Wednesday, 27 March 2013

IT is sad but now inevitable that Britain is destined to become one of the most repressed and secretive countries in the world.
It is already plummeting down the United Nations chart of nations where freedom of the Press is respected.
By the time the Government has finished implementing its version of the Leveson report, complete with licensed media, and the police have finished Operations Elveden and Weeting, then we will truly be languishing in the lower regions of the lowest division.
It comes as no comfort to me that I have watched this state of affairs unfold over the decades I have been a working journalist. Too much of my time and energy has been wasted trying to prevent the inexorable progress of the press shacklers.
There was a time when publicity was courted by politicians, police and any organisation on the side of good.
There was a conspiracy of consensus between those who valued the glue that held society together.
If people transgressed what was commonly seen as decent behaviour they could expect censor and exposure in the media.
Slowly over the years, the cult of the individual has overturned this arrangement. Human rights legislation, the data protection act and the obsession by a House of Commons dominated by lawyers to introduce laws which line their profession’s pockets have led to current proposal that any publication which doesn’t sign up to the Government’s license risks being priced out of existence.
There are so many ironies in this that it is hard to know where to start, or finish. Let’s stick to three.
One, when I directly handled complaints at a major city daily newspaper, 95% of them were about statements made in court. Readers would berate the newspaper for reporting, accurately, what had been said by lawyers in mitigation for their clients. The most vociferous MP in his attacks on the media, Clive Soley, was of course a lawyer. So lying lawyers fed a lawyer’s campaign to vilify the media.
Two, an obsession with privacy, stoked by the famous and influential, has come hand-in-glove with the explosion of social media, which in the words of the founder of Facebook, are leading to a world in which there is no such thing as privacy.
Three, in a world in which everyone can be a publisher, through the likes of Facebook or Twitter, Lord Leveson’s report totally ignores the new media. So we are left with laws drafted and aimed specifically at the established print media and the journalists who work for them.
For more than 300 years journalists in this country have had to follow laws and conventions that apply to the whole population. Now we enter a brave new world when this is no longer true.
There are already a couple of dozen laws, civil and criminal, that can be used to prevent publication, including defamation, contempt, prejudice, data protection, secrets acts and child protection. Many of these are right and proper in a civilised society.
Knowledge of them is essential for professional journalists and comprises most of their training needs. What the Government plans to do now is penalise those who actually understand restrictions of free speech, and give unfair advantage to the bloggers and other rabble-rousers who haven’t got a clue.
Any perusal of social media would expose how dangerous this is, with racist, bigoted, prejudicial and downright offensive remarks on every site.
None of the above is supposed to excuse the phone-hacking or bribery of police officers and others for information, if that is what happened.
This is criminal behaviour, for which there are perfectly good laws which could have been applied to bring the perpetrators to book. To use a few cases where the police and politicians were too weak or corrupt to intervene to justify laws aimed specifically at muzzling or curtailing the Press is both bizarre and deeply troubling to anyone who believes in freedom of expression.

Wednesday, 13 March 2013

I called in today to see farmer Edward Steele who has been fighting officialdom for years.
He is the third generation to have leasehold of a 30-acre farm hidden from view in the folds of rural land between Burneside and Kendal, and nestling up to the banks of the River Sprint, a tributary of the Kent.
It is more than 20 years since he decided the land could not support him and his family so started to put static caravans on the site as holiday lets.
Instead he found that there was a huge demand from families wanting a rustic life-style but at a cost that could be afforded in the highly priced property markets of the Lake District.
As demand grew, he put up more and more lodges and barn structures, attracting alternative life-style tenants. Some carried out small businesses in other barns.
Mr Steele charged them roughly half of the commercial rents in nearby Kendal town. In addition he provided free wood-burners and fuel.
Trees and hedges grew around these “eco-lodges” so that the former agricultural land became wooded glades where wild-life flourished.
Children played in a country idyll, safely. Some were educated at home by their new age parents.
Many of the tenants had histories of mental illness, as does Mr Steele, but the lifestyle meant they were able to support each other and stay out of the clutches of the health system.
His landlords, a Catholic charity, took a proportion of the rental income and the local council, South Lakeland District Council, took rates and emptied the bins.
So everyone was happy.
But there was blight on their horizon. Mr Steele had acquired, by default, planning permission for four of the lodges, but not the rest. And the land was clearly allocated for farming on the district plan.
So officialdom’s wheels ground slowly into action. Mr Steele had to apply for planning permission, which was refused.
He appealed and lost again. He was told to restore the land for agriculture. That meant evicting the tenants, which he refused to do, as well as flattening hedgerows, trees and the lodges.
He was prosecuted once and won on a technicality as the council charged him as the owner.
So they started again by taking him to civil court for breach of the planning inspector’s ruling.
This time a judge agreed the council’s was right in law, which is all that matters in the courts.
He ordered Mr Steele to do as he had been told or face jail.
The council has now gone to enormous expense of re-housing the tenants in urban properties they don’t want to be in. There will be an on-going cost to ratepayers from housing benefit. No doubt the health service will face future costs of dealing with mental illness. Goodness knows how much the court hearings and council officer time cost the public purse.
A depressed Mr Steele spends every day at the controls of a massive digger destroying the wild-life haven he has spent two decades encouraging, uprooting trees and hedgerows and clearing the debris. All but the four original lodges are emptied and flattened.
The whole area now looks like a World War One battle scene, and no, that is not hyperbole.
In private moments the SLDC councilors say they have to comply with the law. Besides they don’t want shanty towns springing up all over the fringes of the Lake District.
“We have to draw the line somewhere,” said one senior councillor.
Mr Steele fears he will be evicted by the charity from the farmhouse his grandfather built 100 years ago and without the income from lodges he will be declared bankrupt, as the farm is even less viable than it was when he started on this journey.
Why do I feel that this is a crying shame and proof that sometimes the law can be an ass?

Tuesday, 26 June 2012

LIKE a lot of businesses these days, including NatWest bank, mine has become totally dependent on new technology.
Using the world-wide web enables me to gather information, reconfigure it to suit my customers and then send it by e-mail, anywhere around the globe.
So when a worker driving a bulldozer to dig a trench across a field opposite my house cut through the BT cable, my business came to an immediate halt. The Internet as well as business and home landlines ceased to work, as you would expect.
That wasn’t BT’s fault. But what happened next gave an interesting insight into the thinking processes of Britain’s exclusive IT communications company. Unless you use a satellite supplier, your internet, and of course your telephone landline, come down BT Network’s cables.
So I rang 151 on my mobile, as I remembered it as the BT Engineer’s number. I got Vodafone, my mobile provider. The Vodafone technician used the web to try to find a BT phone number for me, but could only come up with internet solutions, obviously no good as I had no internet.
I eventually found a number in the phone book which I recognized as the old engineer’s number 151, but with a 0800 prefix. I rang it.
I was told by an English sounding recorded message that my call would be recorded for training purposes. I was then told by a different, Scottish-sounding, recorded message that I would be charged 14p a minute for the call and invited to ring another number which might be cheaper. I declined and stuck with the 151.
I was told by a third recorded message that they were busy and would I prefer to report my fault on-line. As I had no internet this was not possible. After listening for 20 times to the same advice, I was starting to get angry.
An hour later the phone was answered by a human being with an Asian sub-continent accent on a very poor line. By then my mobile was low on charge, so he was having trouble hearing me too.
We shouted at each other across the ether. Then I made a dreadful error. I tried to be helpful and told him about the bulldozer and the cable.
He said in that case I had to ring a different number belonging to the strangely named Open Reach Network 3rd Party Damage Report Team. This I did reluctantly. Then I got another set of recorded voice messages about 0800 being expensive, would I like to ring another number, and that I couldn’t use this number to report faults or broadband service interruption.
But that was the number my BT friend had told me to ring, so what was I supposed to do? I stuck with it. After more recorded messages about them being busy, I finally got though to another human being.
She told me I had to ring BT engineers to report the fault! I screamed. I then tried to remain calm enough to explain events so far. She said it wasn’t her fault but she only dealt with health and safety issues. It was her job to make sure there was no danger to the public, but faults had to be reported to my provider.
But my provider is BT, and BT owns Open Reach, I argued. But Open Reach is not allowed to give BT customers preference and Oftel insists they refer me back to BT engineers, she countered. She said I shouldn’t have told the engineers about the damage.
What is more, she added helpfully, if Open Reach repaired the cable that didn’t mean the fault would be fixed. That was up to the BT engineers.
I screamed again. Then I called BT Engineers again. This time I didn’t mention the damage.
I was put onto an automatic system that told me they were checking the line and would I like to report it on-line. As I was talking to a recorded message, I couldn’t explain that they were wasting their time. I knew there was a fault and no, I couldn’t go on-line BECAUSE MY CABLE WAS SEVERED!
Besides if I had told them that they would probably have told me to ring health and safety again. So I kept quiet and waited.
Another quarter of an hour later, I was told there was a fault. You, dear reader, should now understand that this was not a surprise to me. They then said that I could be kept up to date by text messages, to which I agreed.
So I got a text, then a phone call from Open Reach, telling me again that they were worried about health and safety. It would take a couple of hours for a man to come from Liverpool “to assess the damage” but the cable might not be repaired until tomorrow. And no, that didn’t mean the fault would be fixed.
I then got three texts from Vodafone asking me to rate the level of service. I hope BT do the same.
I then received a phone call from Open Reach in Liverpool, asking me to tell them if the damaged cable was a danger to the public. I didn’t think so, but if I told them that, they would put us off to later, so I said I wasn’t able to make that judgment for them.
The Scouser was obviously not happy at my lack of co-operation. He said he would have to spend extra money getting someone out. In the circumstances, I didn’t dissuade him.
I then got a text message from BT saying they would try to fix the fault by 5pm the following day.
Oh, and by the way, the text told me to track progress on-line. Aaaaaaargh!
Four hours after the original incident an Open Reach turned up, but not to repair the cable, never mind fix the fault, but to assess the danger. He put a triangular fence with red and white tape round the damaged cable and left it unrepaired. That was end of day one.
Day two an Open Reach engineer turned up and fixed the cable and fault by 10 a.m. So in the end BT’s various companies did quite well in the circumstances. If they want advice on human communication, as opposed to IT, then I know where they can get it.
That’s what my business does.

About Me

A journalist for 40 years, 25 of them as senior manager. I now run a media consultancy, which involves media relations, media campaigns, media training, freelance journalism and communications strategies. For more see: www.lakesandbaycomms.co.uk or http://t.co/MYv07P3